Archive for the ‘fruit trees’ Category

Today we’re having one of those slow steady rains, the kind that lasts all day, the kind you sometimes get after an extended hot dry spell, you can almost hear the land sighing with relief. The birds are singing and much more active than they have been, it’s cool and overcast and just what I’ve been hoping for for weeks! It’s also giving me time to finally post on the garden.

We have gotten so much done this season, it probably isn’t as obvious to the rest of the world but we see the work we’ve done and it is looking so much better already.

Here is the truck taking away dumpster #1 which we filled with mixed trash, everything from old rotting stuffed lawn chairs, to broken clothes drying contraptions, to miles of rotting electrical wire, ancient unearthed plastic bags, rusty nails and screws, broken window glass, vodka bottles whole and broken (must have been nearly 100 bottles scattered and buried) you name it, we’ve found it here. This is all stuff that we have slowly been harvesting from the property (courtesy of the old tenants!) as we dig and clear new areas.

Dumpster guy left us another dumpster which we filled with over a ton of rotting wood that was laying around in piles all over the property. I swear this place was like a landfill, we are still unearthing things as we dig planting beds but I think the bulk of it is gone now. We’re talking 2-3 tons of trash…unreal.

So anyway, I’ll give you a little tour of some of what we’ve been planting around here. The pictures all look a bit over-exposed because I took them on an incredibly hot, bright morning a few days ago…too much sun.

Here is a freshly dug bed that runs along the front of the house, next year I’ll fill it with perennials but for this year I’ve planted some sunflowers which will get about 6ft tall. I have also sowed dinosaur kale and raddichio just on the other side of that concrete brick, it is just beginning to sprout.

And here is my long awaited Zephyrine Drouhin rose. It took over 2 months to finally acquire one, I was beginning to lose hope. It is currently about 1 1/2 ft tall and has one very tiny bud. I don’t care about flowers this year, I just want it to establish enough to survive the winter and maybe even reach the first bar of the trellis ;O)

This next bit is more of a ‘wildlife installation’. The brush pile has been there since last fall and we have been adding to it this season too. Since early spring it has been taken over by dozens of ground sparrows. I had the pleasure of their company all winter as well, as they spent their days eating all the seed off the ground which fell down from the bird feeder.

The brush pile seems to be a congregating point, a social meeting/mating spot for them. They have built their nests in the roof of the big barn across the street and some are nesting in crevices under our roof as well, but they spend alot of time on the brush pile. I love having them there.

The next addition to my ‘wildlife installation’ was a DIY bird bath. I have felt really sorry for the birds during this incredibly hot and long dry spell so I just used what we happened to have laying around and built this bath.

It consists of a big concrete block that the previous tenants had buried in the ground as an anchor for their laundry thingie, talk about over-building syndrome! Poor P spent an entire afternoon trying to get it out from the bottom of the 4ft hole he had to dug to get to it . He got it out using nothing but long crowbar-like levers and lots of swearing, it weighs a ton.

On top of the huge block of concrete I set a large plastic plant pot bottom, it’s about 2 ft in diameter, in the middle I set a large stone to hold it in place and to also provide an island for any unfortunate critters (like bees) who might fall in while drinking.

It’s not much to look at but the price was right and the birds love it!

Here’s what the studio is looking like currently. The rose to the left has been there for about 3 years but I haven’t been too successful about getting it to climb up and over the roof, I hope the trellis P built this year will make a difference, I’m also, admittedly, giving a bit more attention than I had been doing, it is definitely showing progress so we’ll see.

In the tub in front of the studio I have sown some beautiful pink rose mallow. It’s growing but not fast enough for me ;O)

In the cracks along the stone path I have planted creeping ‘Bressingham’ thyme, also very tiny at the moment.

Here’s a clematis I planted earlier this spring, it’s grown about 2-3 ft since then! It’s an early bloomer, with large lavender flowers, called Mrs. Cholmondeley.

This is a late blooming clematis that we planted on the wood shed, it’s called Jackmanii and has gorgeous dark violet flowers.

These are red currants which are nearly ripe, we only have a few canes currently so I just leave these berries for the birds. Next year we will plant a large berry garden on the other side of the house and then we’ll add more of these so we get a decent harvest.

Apples slowly ripening on our Roter Berlepsch apple tree, these are good eating apples. We also have a Gravenstein which is mainly a cooking apple.

This is an attempt at making a bumblebee house, but unfortunately no bumble bees moved in. I think maybe the hole is too vertical and so there would be rain getting in and falling on the little bumblebee heads…not good. They do however live in the crevices in this stone wall, so that’s ok, at least they are here. I still haven’t given up on the idea of bumblebee housing, but I think the hole needs to be horizontal. Anyone ever tried this with flower pots? Any suggestions?

And speaking of bumble bees if you look closely you’ll discover that the center of the pink flower is actually a bumble bee bum :O)

I am growing two varieties of cherry tomatoes on my porch. Tomatoes don’t do well here unless they are kept out of the rain, they are borderline greenhouse plants here, you can grow them outside with alot of care and attention but they do so much better in a greenhouse, or under cover. They are doing well for me in pots on the porch so this is what I will do until we eventually get a greenhouse.

And lastly, a few pics of my poor kitties who can’t stand the heat and tend to move from one shady patch to the next until they finally get to where they are going.

Any little patch of shade will do!

Well, that’s not all we’ve done but the rest of the pictures didn’t turn out so well. I’ll give you an update as things grow. Hope you are enjoying your garden too!

This spring has blossomed for us with new ideas and a new direction. Many things have remained the same, our view of the world and how we wish to interact with it is the same; self-sufficiency is important to us, living as green as possible is very important to us, eating and living a vegan lifestyle is important to us. Doing our best to NOT support the “Evil Empire” better known as “big business” is also very important to us. We’re only two people who can’t really hope to make a huge difference in the world, but that’s not the point, we feel that our efforts, in concert with two other people, and two other people and two other people, is what will make the difference so we do all that we can even though things look fairly hopeless sometimes.

Our dreams of being totally self-sufficient I think were a bit too ambitious for us. In our perfect fantasy we would have the most beautiful and prolific garden you can imagine, free of pests and disease, we would make all our own clothes, candles, furniture, etc. We’d only use bikes or public transportation as a means of getting around, we’d power everything with solar energy, we’d barter for everything else we needed, our land and home would be paid off, we’d be free from money and all the problems is causes. Nice dream, isn’t it… But for us it simply isn’t possible. So, we’ve reined in our dream just a bit, into something we can actually achieve. Some people will say, “you’re just giving up!” But I don’t think so, rather we are being realistic; given our age, our level of fitness, our experience and knowledge, given that we have to work full-time jobs, we aren’t left with enough hours in the day, nevermind enough energy, to achieve all we’d like to…We haven’t given up, we’ve simply discovered what is actually possible for us and being totally self-sufficient isn’t one of those things.

So we finally gave in and bought a new car which we hope will last us for many, many, many years. It’s a Twingo, the tiniest most fuel efficient, environmentally friendly (ha!) car we could find. We try to only go through 1 tank of fuel a month which means quite a bit of bike-riding during the week for my husband to and from work. It adds about 1 hour a day to his commuting time, but it also adds fresh air, exercise and beautiful scenery and a peaceful quiet time each morning to just think and enjoy being outdoors without the stress and frustration of traffic jams.

Bees…

We hope this year to increase our bee hives. We’ve had a few rough years where we had weak struggling hives and ended up losing some of them over the previous winter. We never take much honey from our bees even at the best of times, honey isn’t the main goal for us, we mainly just like having the bees here and knowing that they are helping to improve the land around us which is a good thing for the planet in general. But we haven’t harvested honey from our bees at all in the past 2 years trying to give them the time and resources to build themselves up again. I think those efforts have paid off because our two remaining hives came out of this past winter very strong, healthy and hardy. We should see some swarms from them this summer which will give us the opportunity to create more hives. We will probably take a bit of honey (20-30 jars worth) and leave them the rest which will be quite alot.

This is a shot of our two hives taken about 1 month ago, as they are just starting to wake up and become active. We have since added additional boxes to the top of the hives for honey storage. We had to add the boxes much sooner than usual this year as they are collecting so much. :O)

Our plan is to hopefully move the bees into Warre’ style hives as I have mentioned before, and to increase to as many as 6 hives during this season. We also want to build 2 or 3 Kenya Top-Bar style hives and keep those on the other side of the property under our apple trees. Those will be my hives :O) It should be an easier system for me to work with, with much less heavy lifting and shuffling around of boxes. Both of the systems we will use are in general less intrusive and hands-on so that we don’t have to disturb the bees as often as is necessary with the more common/commercial style bee hives.

One problem is that we have always had trouble catching our swarms because our bees insist on sitting in the highest branches of the tallest trees on our property, there is absolutely no way we can reach them. So this year we are doing a little experiment, we anchored an empty Warre’ hive to the roof of our porch, we’re hoping that maybe a swarm will move into it (not necessarily a swarm from our bees because when bees swarm they instinctively move a greater distance from the mother hive so they will have enough food, but there are also 2-3 other bee keepers in the area so we might possibly attract one of their swarms, just as they might acquire one of our swarms… it all works out in the end ;O)

You can see the hive up on the roof in this picture. The box behind and slightly above it is a bat house…we love having bats in our area and will be adding more bat houses on our property in the coming years.

We’ve decided that our main focus crop-wise is going to be fruit. Fruit trees and berries. The reason for this is that for one thing, it’s the perfect thing to grow with bees. Another reason is that not as much space is required for the yeild you will get, we don’t have much space here. And another reason is that fruit is so very expensive! We eat alot of fruit over the growing season and around here we are paying 4 euro for a tiny 1 cup container of berries, it’s really quite insane! Vegetable crops require alot more space and effort to actually make a substantial difference and besides the prices are pretty reasonable by comparison, so growing fruit makes the most sense for us.

We will of course grow a few select vegetables in and amongst our future flower beds and in containers, but not many and nothing formal. I’ve decided that I don’t want any straight lines in the yard, no square beds, no straight rows, which carry the feeling of being man-made and controlled. I want a very informal arrangement which doesn’t feel forced or “contrived”, but which feels natural. Lots and lots of flowers and flowering bushes. In short, we’ve decided to create a cottage garden which will be created in such a way that it will become a sanctuary. Not only for us, but for the local wildlife as well, including the insects as well as the birds and animals.The wildlife in our area has a very rough time these days just as it does most everywhere on the planet with all the farming, building, pollution, hunting and the ever increasing intrusion by man into their habitats…really, they need all the help they can get and it is what I want to spend my energy and space helping them with. I want to do what I can to create a place which helps and doesn’t hinder them. Of course with our limited funds, time and resources, this is going to take years but now that we have a clear goal and vision, we are off to a good start.

Currently we are working on clearing the land of all the garbage that has collected over the years, left by two generations of homeowners who lived here before us. They were anything but kind to the land here and used it as their own personal landfill. It will take alot of work to replenish the soil and just get the place cleared of junk so we can start planting. We rented a huge garbage container this week and are working to fill it. It will probably take 1 or 2 more containers before we’re done. Unfortunately these things aren’t cheap! But we can’t do much until the garbage is gone.

Another goal for this season is to plant the rest of our hedge, it will cost about 500 euro to finish. We started our thorn hedge about 4 years ago but couldn’t finish it until this year. The hedgehogs, birds and other little critters especially love living in thorn hedges. We’re using hawthorn, blackthorn, wild dog rose, wild apple and wild pear plants to create the hedge. The hedge flowers in early spring which is good for our bees since not much else is flowering at that time. It will take about 4 years until it starts looking like a proper hedge.

One of the things I’d like to grow aside from fruit trees and berries is tomatoes which are also quite expensive. I’m experimenting with cherry tomatoes in our veranda this year, tomatoes don’t do very well here without being covered or grown in a greenhouse so I thought they might do well in our south-facing veranda.

Well, this post is getting quite long now so I will wrap it up here. I’ll continue to post on our progress over the season and share pictures with you. I will leave you with this shot of a trellis my husband built the other day. One of the first plants I bought this year was a climbing rose called “Zephirine Drouhin”. No true cottage garden would be complete without a few climbing roses. So we’ve made a beginning! The rose hasn’t been delivered yet, I had to order it,but it should be here and planted by next Monday :O)

I’ve been fiddling with this program all day, I also tried a few other blog programs at the same time and this is the one I like best. I’m starting to feel more comfortable with all the gidgets and gadgets, widgets and wadgets, the feeds and burns and all the other high tech stuff I’m not used to! I can tell that this is going to make life a lot easier for me once I’ve worked with it a bit more, it’s just gonna take a while.

I did take a short break this afternoon and went grocery shopping for jam making supplies. We are lucky enough to have dozens of plum, pear and apple trees growing wild in our area. It’s very common to see them planted one after another all along the old tractor and small village roads. I think this practice started after the war when food was so scarce. I’ll try and get some pictures tomorrow. Anyway, people don’t harvest from these trees like they used to so most of the fruit just falls off the trees and rots. The critters enjoy it but it makes me sad to see all that food going to waste. So sometime during the next week I’m gonna get me a big old basket full of plums and make some plum butter. I haven’t had that in years!

We checked the pear trees also but they aren’t ripe yet. There’s a lonely old tractor road just above our house where someone planted several pear varieties. Now they sit there forgotten…